Quickstart¶
This page gives a brief introduction to the library. It assumes you have the library installed. If you don’t, check the Installing portion.
A Minimal Bot¶
Let’s make a bot that responds to a specific message and walk you through it.
It looks something like this:
Note
Because this example utilizes message content, it requires the Intents.message_content
privileged intent.
import discord
intents = discord.Intents.default()
intents.message_content = True
client = discord.Client(intents=intents)
@client.event
async def on_ready():
print(f'We have logged in as {client.user}')
@client.event
async def on_message(message):
if message.author == client.user:
return
if message.content.startswith('$hello'):
await message.channel.send('Hello!')
client.run('your token here')
Let’s name this file example_bot.py
. Make sure not to name it discord.py
as that’ll conflict
with the library.
There’s a lot going on here, so let’s walk you through it step by step:
The first line just imports the library, if this raises a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportError then head on over to Installing section to properly install.
Next, we create an instance of a
Client
. This client is our connection to Discord.We then use the
Client.event()
decorator to register an event. This library has many events. Since this library is asynchronous, we do things in a “callback” style manner.A callback is essentially a function that is called when something happens. In our case, the
on_ready()
event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up and theon_message()
event is called when the bot has received a message.Since the
on_message()
event triggers for every message received, we have to make sure that we ignore messages from ourselves. We do this by checking if theMessage.author
is the same as theClient.user
.Afterwards, we check if the
Message.content
starts with'$hello'
. If it does, then we send a message in the channel it was used in with'Hello!'
. This is a basic way of handling commands, which can be later automated with the discord.ext.commands framework.Finally, we run the bot with our login token. If you need help getting your token or creating a bot, look in the Creating a Bot Account section.
Now that we’ve made a bot, we have to run the bot. Luckily, this is simple since this is just a Python script, we can run it directly.
On Windows:
$ py -3 example_bot.py
On other systems:
$ python3 example_bot.py
Now you can try playing around with your basic bot.
A Minimal Bot with Slash Commands¶
As a continuation, let’s create a bot that registers a simple slash command!
It looks something like this:
import discord
bot = discord.Bot()
@bot.event
async def on_ready():
print(f"We have logged in as {bot.user}")
@bot.slash_command(guild_ids=[your, guild_ids, here])
async def hello(ctx):
await ctx.respond("Hello!")
bot.run("your token here")
Let’s look at the differences compared to the previous example, step-by-step:
The first line remains unchanged.
Next, we create an instance of
Bot
. This is different fromClient
, as it supports slash command creation and other features, while inheriting all the features ofClient
.We then use the
Bot.slash_command()
decorator to register a new slash command. Theguild_ids
attribute contains a list of guilds where this command will be active. If you omit it, the command will be globally available, and may take up to an hour to register.Afterwards, we trigger a response to the slash command in the form of a text reply. Please note that all slash commands must have some form of response, otherwise they will fail.
Finally, we, once again, run the bot with our login token.
Congratulations! Now you have created your first slash command!